hehehehe. I'm sure the new gear *is* faster, but at which point do you just stop noticing? If a page renders in 19ms instead of 20ms, it is faster, but would you notice and is it worth the extra power consumption?

Seconded.Sheesh, half of my fiddling time with new computers is finding ways to get the power consumtpion down. My flatmate just inherited a top-end gaming rig (Core2 Extreme, 2GB "gamer" RAM, 8800GTX, 2xRaptors in RAID0) and is saying it only seems marginally faster than his previous Celeron/1GB/6600GT which had a lower power draw at full pelt than this new hulk does at idle. Most users have already stopped noticing (miniscule) speed improvements and only believe a machine is faster because the marketing s

Hey hey hey, you're not a troll, don't be so hard on yourself.Anyways, before anyone comments, let me add to my post. 1.3GHz bus = ~325MHz quad-pumped. Meaning sure you get bandwidth but the latency is still slacking behind. Latency is where the performance is at nowadays anyways. Same with the 1.6GHz memory (which I might add doesn't make much sense attached to a 1.3Ghz FSB).

If you really want performance, memory bandwidth is not the problem nowadays. It's latency. If you have your 3GHz processor idl

One good thing with Santa Rosa is that, while the bus is 800 MHz (ok 200 MHz quad-pumped), Speedstep will affect the bus as well, scaling it down to 400 when relevant, making the chipset far less power hungry than the previous generation, on average.

DFI told us that this board is just a reference design and that the board that we'll see come to market will have a unique cooler design that will be very impressive. I can't wait to install one of these babies in my machine then take off the covers and see the ugly insides 24/7. The noise, the wires, the dust accumulating! I think I need a bigger cooler cause I'm getting so hot

So you think that the only way a 'unique cooler design' could be impressive is to -look- cool? How very sad. The only thing that could impress most geeks is to get the CPU/GPU/ambient an extra few degrees cooler. THAT is impressive.